Myeloid deprived suppressive cell to mediate the prognostic value of neutrophil to hemoglobin ratio for hepatocellular carcinoma patients receiving transcatheter arterial chemoembolization

292 Background: The prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients receiving transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) is far from being identified. The present study aimed to assess role of blood cell counts, routine liver function tests and neutrophil to hemoglobin ratio (NHR) in predicting the progression-free survival (PFS) of these patients. Methods: A total of 243 HCC patients receiving TACE were analyzed retrospectively. Results: Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP) score system was identified to be the best score system among current 12 staging systems for this patient subgroup according akaike information criterion (AIC) index and linear trend χ2. Then, the novel prognostic value of parameters was determined by integration into CLIP score system. As a result, NHR were confirmed to an independent predictor for PFS of HCC patients receiving TACE (p = 0.001) with the other parameters, including neutrophil and neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), failed to reach statistical significance. Moreover, NHR improved the performance of CLIP by adjusted into it, thus improved the discriminatory ability. Furthermore, NHR were defined value ≤ 0.02 as low level and > 0.02 as high level, according to which patients were dichotomized into two groups. HCC patients receiving TACE with low NHR presented higher 1 year disease control rate (DCR) (50.0% vs 39.35%) and 2 year DCR (45.4% vs 27.0%) compared with patients with high NHR level. Besides, NHR level was associated with prognostic factors such as portal vein thrombosis and distant metastasis. Furthermore, in order to determine the mechanism of predictive value of AHR, we tested the proportion of myeloid deprived suppressive cell (MDSC) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) of 43 HCC patients. It was revealed that MDSC was positively correlated with neutrophil (P< 0.05). Since MDSC was cancer promoter, it might be the mechanism of the prognostic value of NHR. Conclusions: The present study firstly identified NHR as an independent prognostic factor in HCC patients receiving TACE. The positive correlation of MDSC and neutrophil might be the latent mechanism.